


Come, my darling, all is found

by middlemarch



Category: Frozen (Disney Movies), Frozen 2 - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Conversations, F/M, Family, Marriage, Romance, Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:35:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21666046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: Anna was the only person whose conversation pleased him as much as her silence.
Relationships: Anna & Elsa (Disney), Anna/Kristoff (Disney)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 82





	Come, my darling, all is found

“Kristoff, what happened to your parents?” Anna asked. She’d waited to pose the question, plotted probably, knowing her, until he’d agreed it was a good idea to sit in front of the fire in a nest of pillows, it was a good idea to lay his head in her lap and let her run her fingers through his mercifully freshly washed hair, those fingers slender and gentle and a curious mix of torment and grace. He couldn’t feel the ring he’d given her but he knew it was there and he knew in the firelight, the gold was the same color as his damp hair, curling in the warmth of the flames; he knew because she’d said so, almost whispering instead of a giddy cry and that had been a hint, a clue, that she’d had something up her sleeve beside her bare arm scented with verbena and lavender from her bath.

“I’m an orphan, you know that,” he said. A funny kind of orphan with two families, implacable granite trolls and now Anna and Elsa, Sven and Olaf, Nokk nickering against his hand a delightful way to get frostbite. He didn’t know what she was getting at, but Anna would let him know. She sighed softly and he felt it against his cheek.

“But how? I’d like to say you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, if it hurts you too much, but then I shouldn’t have asked in the first place and I did, so in for a penny as the English ambassador says, though why he won’t say a pound of what it’s for I don’t know. A pound of flour? Of spice from the Silk Road? It really devalues the penny not to be clear,” Anna said, rambling the way she did when she was nervous with him but not anxious enough to say so or to find a thousand ways to bump into him. She had a genius for clumsiness as it suited her and it had; most people didn’t think twice about it. He’d seen her use exquisite care in taking a stone from Sven’s hoof, mending a piece of lace her mother had left her; he’d seen how Yelena admired the way she walked through the woods, respectful of every fallen leaf.

“A fever. I was very little, not a baby but not much more. One of those sicknesses that sweeps through and sometimes no one dies and sometimes it’s just an old, old man who can only eat gruel. And sometimes it’s a dozen young, healthy people, a shepherd and his wife. Geir and Dagny, that’s what they were called.” It was possibly the most he’d ever said about his parents, so it made sense it was Anna he told.

“Do you miss them?” No one had ever asked that question before, but that was Anna in a nutshell and he’d fallen in love with her for it, for thinking of questions like that and for finding a way to ask them. Her fingers grazed his cheekbones, traced the line of his brow.

“I miss the idea of them. Their presence. I can’t miss them, I don’t remember them,” he said. And then, because it sounded so bleak, he spoke again. “I had Pabbie and Bestemor, I was looked after.”

“Sometimes I wish…” she began, as hesitant as he’d ever heard her. He made a low sound, not quite a word, a murmur to encourage her to go on. “Sometimes, I wish it had been something like that with my parents. Something straightforward—a plague or an accident. Something simple, that made sense.”

“Something simple?”

“You’ll think I’m horrible, that I’m making light of you losing your parents and I don’t mean it that way at all, I’m so sorry for you that you lost them and I’m sorry for them that they didn’t get to raise their little boy, but at least, at least there weren’t any secrets. Any lies, any… concealment. If Elsa hadn’t been as strong as she is, we’d never have known any of it. I sit at my father’s desk and I wear my mother’s crown and I think, how could they? How could they keep it all from us?” Kristoff had had a similar thought occur, after Anna and Elsa had explained what they’d learned and how, but he’d dismissed it, figuring he was only an iceman who kept company with a reindeer, not the ruler of a kingdom, father of princesses.

“I don’t know,” he said. He looked up at Anna, her chestnut hair loose on her shoulders, falling out of its ribbon fillet. He remembered it white with magic. Her eyes had not been as dark then, facing her own death, as they were now. No one had ever seen her this way but him, no one else had ever seen just how lovely she was.

“It’s not much of an answer, is it?” she said but it wasn’t a reproach. He thought of Anna and her sister, the tale Elsa had told and the expression on Lt. Mattias’s face when he’d heard, how it had been clear it was the truth.

“Your parents, I think something was broken in them,” he said slowly. “Your grandfather’s betrayal, it was an injury that never healed, exile and grief and they were both so young, without anyone to guide them. They made mistakes,” he said, feeling his way from one word to another the way he might walk out on a frozen lake, willing it to hold his weight.

“Mistakes,” Anna repeated.

“Not you or Elsa, I don’t mean that. They never reckoned with what happened, until it was too late. They were afraid, perhaps? Afraid they couldn’t face it together, sure they couldn’t face it alone,” he said. “That they couldn’t face you or Elsa, if you knew who they were.”

“You’re awfully generous in your interpretation, Kristoff,” Anna said, trying to sound skeptical but he could hear the tears she held back.

“They loved you very much, Anna,” he said.

“Then why does it hurt so much?” she asked. He caught her wrist in his hand, noticing again how delicately made she was. Who else would ask that question so clearly? He understood what it meant that she asked it of him, how certain he was to answer.

“That’s why it hurts so much,” he said. He wondered if she’d considered he couldn’t kiss her like this, that he couldn’t really turn away from her. He wouldn’t put it past her, he wasn’t one who’d ever underestimated how smart she was. Foolhardy, yes, but sharp as a scythe. “Have you talked about this with Elsa?”

“No. She’s not interested—she’s busy communing with the spirits at Ahtohallen, riding Nokk, coming into her power. She wouldn’t understand. She got magic. I got a lullaby and a shawl,” Anna said.

“It’s not enough?” He didn’t say _I’m not enough_ but he couldn’t keep from thinking it.

“It’s everything. This is everything,” she said, one hand gesturing at the fire, at his long legs stretched out in the ruddy light, the sweet smell of wood-smoke and the lavender on her skin. “You’re everything.” She ruffled his hair but her tone was serious, an endearment in and of itself. He saw the curve of her lips, the beautiful line of her shoulder where her dressing gown was falling off.

“You’re too far away,” he said, grabbing at some of the velvet pillows. “Won’t you come down here with me? It’s late, it’s a good time to watch for the spirits dancing in the flames.”

“That’s your offer?” she said a little wry, but scuttled around to rest her head against his broad shoulder, not the pillow nest he’d made for her.

“That’s an offer. A beginning,” he said. She laughed, a warm, delighted sound, with something of the fire’s appetite in it. It meant the beginning could start with his kiss, their beginning today and every day, no matter what had come before.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written to answer questions I had about Anna and Kristoff's families but mostly Anna's parents baffling decision-making. I've offered up an answer, but it's not the only one of course.
> 
> Bestemor means grandmother in Norwegian (according to the Interwebs).
> 
> Title is from Frozen 2.


End file.
